This is an intricately painted miniature bowl Dolores Curran.  Before she began making her carved pieces, she was well known for her delicately painted buff-on-red pottery.  The bowl is highly polished red and painted with a buff clay for the design.  Amazingly, she would paint each piece up to five times to get the color of the matte painted areas deep and consistent enough!  This piece has a feather pattern on two sections and a cloud and mountain design on the other two sections. For the size of the piece, it is amazing that it could even be painted!  Look at how perfect the lines are!  So why doesn’t Dolores make this style anymore? She ran out of the cream colored clay slip for the painting, and so only uses it as an accent on her new work!  As well, this is a larger sized piece of her painted pottery, as she mostly made miniatures due to the time consuming nature of the painting. The bowl is signed on the bottom.  It is in excellent condition with no chips, cracks, restoration or repair.